David Lee, the Riley/Rowell Warriors, and the future costs of a lousy deal

* You know it could be another slow trade-deadline period for the Warriors when the most talk I’ve heard focuses on Brandan Wright, who has some interest. Maybe New Orleans, I’ve heard. But the GSWs clearly won’t get back much for him and might just hold on and let him walk away this summer.

-Fact: Warriors management badly over-estimated the impact David Lee would make and fell in love with his PR aura and “All-Star” status as if that was 1,000% proof of his essential greatness.

Oops.

We know this happened, and we know it’s typical of the Warriors’ short-sighted management and absurd exaggerations under Robert Rowell, who is still the team president and Joe Lacob may never, ever remove him.

And that would be on Joe Lacob, period.

But I wonder if GSW management really had any clue how bad the Lee deal could turn out to be into the future, and by future, I mean NOW.

(Right here, I’ll say Riley made a good signing in Dorrell Wright, and a good deal to dump Corey Maggette. But the Lee fiasco will blot both things out before we even bring up the 2010 draft.)

We know GM Larry Riley, Rowell and maybe Lacob, too, as a prospective owner, were out-foxed by Lee’s agents and the NY Knicks.

But did they at all realize that adding Lee at $80M would severely restrict what they could do at this trade deadline and also into this off-season and yes, even next off-season?

That would be classic Rowell Warriors–to make a bad deal and then have no perception of how deeply and enduringly it will affect and limit them.

You want to know why the Warriors are not believed to be involved in high-end trade talk leading up to the Feb. 24 deadline, though they obviously have displayed two or three major voids?

It’s largely because the Rowell/Riley Warriors already made their move, and sucked up most of their flexibillity by doing it:

They added Lee last summer. Voila!

Add Lee, there goes most of the GSW’s talent and fiscal flexibility heading into this trade deadline period and next off-season. Genius.

Maybe the Warriors will get extra creative and find a way to add a significant player in the next few weeks. Maybe. We’ll see.

I’m not saying it’s impossible after the Lee Summer Fun.

But when you start trying to figure out what elements they could put together to land a true difference-maker… you keep going back to the Lee trade, and the things they lost while acquiring him.

Let’s break this into three sections…

-Part 1: Lee is a nice guy, but he’s not making the Warriors better. At all. And that’s amazing to say for a team that often had horrible Corey Maggette and Don Nelson’s D-Leaguer Wanna-Bes playing the 4/5 spots last season.

-Part 2: The sign-and-trade deal not only foisted Lee’s $80M deal on them, but to do it, the GSWs had to give up Anthony Randolph and Ronny Turiaf, who remain tradeable assets.

-Part 3/Conclusion: When you add Lee’s bulky salary to the W’s previous commitments, and subtract a few tradeable assets… you get a Warriors team that is still terribly unbalanced and awful defensively, and yet is in even worse shape financially than it was before Lee’s arrival.

Let’s put it this way: Though he’s not playing, the Knicks can get a No. 1 pick in the 20s for Randolph any time they want to, and they probably will do it soon.

Given his contract, there is no way the Warriors could get any kind of No. 1 pick for Lee right now. No chance. Zero.

They bid against themselves to get Lee, and there was a reason for this.

OK, let’s go to the details…

* Part 1: Lee is supposed to be a rebounding maniac and theoretically was brought in to single-handedly turn the GSWs from the worst-rebounding team in recent history into a decent one.

That has not happened.

Lee gets a lot of rebounds, but the Warriors actually rebound at a higher rate when he’s OUT (48.8%) than when he’s IN (47.4%).

(A fluke? Nope, the same thing happened with Lee on the Knicks the last two years, by the way.)

Last season, the Warriors only grabbed 44.4% of the available rebounds, one of the lowest totals in decades.

This season, the percentage is better (47.5%), so give Lee some credit there, but the Warriors are still tied for last in rebounding percentage. He has not made them a good rebounding team. They are still a horrible rebounding team.

So… Lee doesn’t score reliably on the low post, and the Warriors have no low-post game .

Lee doesn’t rotate on defense and regularly gets walloped in individual match-ups, which means the Warriors often have to double-team his man, and that only causes further havoc for this poor defensive team.

Monta Ellis and Stephen Curry are obviously poor defensive players. But they are exposed on a nightly basis–without back-up help, except for occasional aide from Andris Biedrins or, when they play, Ekpe Udoh or Lou Amundson–because they get no help from their back line.

(Last year, the Warriors were 2nd-to-last in FG% defense at 48.5%. This year, they’re 4th-worst at 47.1%.

(Last year, the Warriors gave up 112.4 points a game, worst in the league. This year, they’re giving up 106.1, second-worst.

(Last year, they were out-scored by an average of 3.6 points per game. This year, they’re being out-scored by 3.2 points a game.)

Two more things: Lee doesn’t run the fastbreak.

And Lee’s FG% is way down from his last few NYK years–because the Knicks ran the pick-and-roll well, giving him easy shots, and the Warriors do not run it well at all.

I know Lee’s supporters keep bringing up his elbow injury, but that was November. Yes, Lee shot 55.5% in January, when all his supporters screamed that he was recovered, and look at him (conveniently against the Warriors’ soft run of opponents).

And, vs. a batch against better foes, Lee is shooting 44.1% in February so far.

The argument that the Warriors are 1-8 without Lee and 22-21 with him in the line-up is factual, but wholly misleading: Six of those nine non-Lee games were on the road, many vs. tough opponents.

The Warriors were going to lose most of those games that Lee missed. He got back for the games they were going to win. It’s math.

In this most recent run of 9 games since Jan. 24 (I presume the Lee fans will stipulate that he was healthy during this stretch, mroe than two months after his injury?), the W’s have played 8 home games and 1 on the road.

They are 0-1 on the road in this stretch. They are 4-4 at home. And the road games are about to come in waves.

( Their victories during this stretch came against Utah without Deron Williams, Milwaukee with Andrew Bogut, Chicago without Joakim Noah and Denver without Chauncey Billups.

(Gee, I always hear the Warriors moaning about their injuries. Did they mention those very helpful injuries in those victories? Not very loudly, if they did.)

The Warriors would’ve won those 4 games with mediocre PF play, which is what they did. They lose those 5 games partly because they’ve gotten mediocre PF play.

Lee has had little impact in this stretch, and has had no impact on the Warriors’ success this season. In fact, there are many games when Lee was one of the major reasons they lost.

For a guy getting paid $13.3M a year… proclaimed to be the answer to the Warriors’ PF woes… that’s a lot of things that Lee does not do well for the Warriors.

* Part 2: I don’t know that Randolph would be any better than Lee–and he probably would be worse, right now- if Randolph was the Warriors’ starting PF.

That I will grant.

But Randolph’s still only 21, he’s still on his rookie deal, and other teams want him. Turiaf is solid when healthy, and on a pretty cheap deal.

When teams are talking about trading away something good, they want players who are young and still have potential (like Randolph), who are useful defensively (like Turiaf) and who are relatively inexpensive (like Randolph and Turiaf, and even Kelenna Azubuike, who was also in the deal, who is hurt, but who is an expiring contract).

Also, Randolph and Turiaf are versatile players–at least they’re more versatile than Lee.

If the Warriors are stuck with Lee, which they are, they have to bend and finagle to figure out who they can play with him.

With Lee there, that’s $13.3M a year less that they have to spend on that great center.

If the Warriors had kept Randolph and threw him out there, he might’ve turned into a high-defense PF. Then the Warriors could look for a scoring center, who didn’t need to be a monster defensive player to cover up for a bad PF.

Or the Warriors could’ve gone for broke and put Randolph (and maybe this year’s No. 1–which turned out to be Udoh) in a deal with Minnesota for Kevin Love. That was an option last summer.

It’s not an option now. (I can’t believe I got people mad at me last summer when I said then that Love was better than Lee, no question. Anybody want to get mad at me about that now?)

* Part 3/Conclusion: Here are the reasons the Warriors might not be able to make a big deal at the deadline…

-Teams that might be thinking about trading a good player want at least one No. 1 draft pick back, but the Warriors can’t trade this year’s or next year’s picks because they might owe one of them to New Jersey to complete the Marcus Williams deal.

(Note: Randolph has the value of a 20s-level pick, or could be traded to a team to get a pick.)

-The Warriors are over the cap right now, and project to be at or over the cap heading into next off-season, too, which means they need to be careful about adding salary.

That’s even if Lacob aggressively adds salary above and beyond the cap, and we do not know if he will do that, or will be allowed to by the new CBA.

(Note: The Lee deal added $1.4M to this year’s payroll, will add $4.1M to the 2011-’12 payroll, and then another $57.2M over the four years after that.)

-The Warriors’ $17M in accumulated expiring contracts aren’t as attractive as they might’ve been in previous years because there are a glut of them this year.

Also, because teams were motivated to clear space last summer (for LeBron, Wade, Bosh, Boozer and Stoudemire) and the Summer of 2012 (for Chris Paul, Deron Williams and Dwight Howard)… but not so much for this summer.

This summer, the marquee name is Carmelo Anthony, but everybody pretty much knows where he’s likely to be headed.

(And yes, the Knicks have cap space, in part, thanks to not re-signing Lee and getting expiring contracts for him.)

I won’t blame the Lee deal for the dropped-value of the expirings any further, other than saying the Warriors spent their flexibility–and went over the cap–for a free agent who… is not LeBron, Stoudemire, Wade, Paul or Howard. That is a crushing difference.

David Lee is not a terrible player. He’s just not a very good one, either, and he was precisely the wrong kind of player for the Warriors to add, and to reward with a cap-busting contract.

They’ve already over-committed to Ellis and Biedrins. The last thing they needed was a third long-term deal for a limited player who cannot play his own man straight up.

Even if he’s a nice guy, and an a (former injury-replacement) All-Star.

–OK, this is already four or five times longer than I wanted, but since I have nowhere else to put it…

When I hear people talk about the Warriors getting into the market for Deron Williams or Dwight Howard in the summer of 2012, I think:

-Why would those players want to come to a losing situation?

-And: You realize the Warriors are tied up financially for a little while?

Yes, they could always trade for Williams or Howard or whoever. But those players are going to want to have great/good teammates… and if the Warriors have to give up Curry to do it, why would a great player want to come join Lee, Ellis and Biedrins?

Lacob has a lot of work to do. I don’t suspect much of it can get done by the deadline.